Value-First Team — Client Relationship

Spherion (Randstad)

The franchised staffing brand of Randstad North America — roughly 180 franchise units run by around 60 independent owners.

USS + VFT co-delivery

Snapshot

What they do

Spherion is the franchised staffing brand of Randstad North America. Around 60 independent franchise owners operate roughly 180 franchise units, grouped into districts, with Strategic Growth Partners each holding a portfolio of franchisees. Randstad USA places and manages a workforce of more than 100,000 people weekly. Atlanta, Georgia.

Engagement

Embedded HubSpot implementation and enablement, with near-daily working sessions alongside their own operations, analyst and development teams.

Systems

HubSpot, integrated with Staffing Connect and PeopleSoft.

Delivery

Co-delivered by Value-First Team and USS.

The relationship

  1. Agreement signed and the embedded engagement opens — working directly inside the team that runs the platform, rather than alongside it.

  2. Ten working sessions covering integration failures, access governance, workflow correction and day-to-day platform practice, with the client’s operations, analyst and developer group in the room together.

  3. Custom code and UI Extensions training, delivered as deliberate knowledge transfer while a core developer was leaving the team.

Where they started

An entire operating business was running on HubSpot — not a marketing CRM, but the system of record for franchise operations, wired to Staffing Connect and PeopleSoft. The platform had been built out faster than the practices around it.

That showed up as work which quietly did not happen. New customer records failed to create when a postal code and a tax code disagreed — and once someone corrected the data, there was no way to send it through again, so the fix stopped at the record. New locations were skipped entirely when a description field arrived blank. Records removed on one side broke transactions still in flight on the other. Sandbox and production had drifted apart, so a workflow that behaved one way in testing behaved differently in production. Custom code lived inside individual workflows with no shared repository and no version history.

None of it announced itself. The failures were silent, and the platform looked like it was working.

What we delivered

  • A retrigger path for failed inbound records — a workflow that re-sends a customer through the integration once a corrected tax or postal code is saved, so a fix actually lands instead of stopping at the record
  • A default for blank location descriptions applied in the outbound message only, so new locations create reliably without changing the staffing system or touching anything that prints on an invoice
  • Deletion removed from the roles that did not need it, plus a documented restore-and-inactivate path for transactions already stuck
  • A permissions model based on ownership rather than convenience, with a restricted administrator profile as the alternative to broad access
  • Sandbox and production workflows brought back into alignment, corrected branch by branch alongside their own developers
  • Playbooks separated from documents, classified against real processes, and given a named owner inside the business
  • Custom code training with a shared repository and a working UI Extension example, delivered as the platform’s own developers changed over
  • Sandbox setup documentation, and the business-analyst guide updated for the franchise spin and merger process

What changed

  • Integration failures that used to end in silence now have a route back — a corrected record re-enters the pipeline on its own
  • New customers and locations create reliably, with no change to the operational system and nothing altered on the invoice
  • Administrative access follows ownership, so the platform’s configuration stops drifting under people who never needed to change it
  • Their developers can read, change and share custom code as a team rather than one person at a time — which held when a core developer left mid-engagement
  • Process capture has an owner inside the business, so playbooks are theirs to run rather than ours to maintain

In a sentence

Spherion runs an entire franchise business out of HubSpot, and records were failing into silence with no way to push a correction through — we closed those loops and trained their own developers to hold the platform, so the capability stayed with them when a key developer left.

At a glance

Delivery

USS + VFT

Engaged

Nov 2025

Franchise units

~180

Platform

HubSpot

Key contacts

Greg MaddenVice President, Source to Pay RaShonda JohnsonSenior Director, IT Business Solutions Marnie WalkerSVP, Franchise Business Operations Afton HartungVice President of Sales Rahul GanorkarChief Information Officer Monica LittleProject Manager Alice ThompsonTechnical Lead